How injuries have affected Heat’s leading trio of Bam Adebayo, Jimmy Butler and Tyler Herro

While injury issues have created an opportunity for the Miami Heat to showcase its impressive depth, those same injury issues have limited the amount of opportunities that the Heat’s leading trio of Bam Adebayo, Jimmy Butler and Tyler Herro have had to play together so far this season.

With Butler returning to play on Saturday night against the Utah Jazz at Delta Center after missing the previous four games because of a strained left calf, it marks just the eighth time in the Heat’s first 32 games of the season that Adebayo, Butler and Herro have all been available to play together.

The Heat entered Saturday outscoring opponents by two points per 100 possessions in the 136 minutes that Adebayo, Butler and Herro have played together this season.

But before Adebayo, Butler and Herro started missing chunks of the schedule, the trio was available for six of the Heat’s first seven games of the season. Just hours before suffering a sprained right ankle that forced him to miss 18 straight games, Herro spoke to the Miami Herald on Nov. 8 about the importance of their regular-season minutes together.

“Our connection as a trio has to be really, really tight just because those actions in the fourth quarter,” Herro said at a point of the season when the trio had been available for all but one game. “[Coach Erik Spoelstra] is trying to create as many actions and as many points throughout the game where we can play with us three in the same actions. So just being connected and conscious of trying to get each other the ball in our areas, but also working together where it’s not like we’re taking turns.”

Since then, Adebayo, Butler and Herro played in just one game together during a seven-week span before Saturday’s opportunity. The Heat’s depth shined during this stretch, but there are still things to discover about the team because its three best players haven’t played together much yet.

Adebayo has been healthy enough to play sustained stretches alongside Butler or Herro over the last seven weeks, but it’s Butler and Herro who have only shared the court in one game since Nov. 8 before finally playing together again on Saturday.

It’s also Butler and Herro who have some things to work through on the offensive end when they’re playing together, even in their fifth season as Heat teammates. That’s an evolving partnership — with Herro taking on an even bigger role in the offense this season — that needs to be fine-tuned through in-game experiences.

“It’s something we continue to work at,” Herro said last month before all of the injuries. “As I’m getting better and Jimmy is Jimmy, trying to make sure I’m not taking away from what he does well and he’s not taking away from what I do well. So just trying to work through that together is one thing. But I think continuing to play together is how we’re going to figure it out. We can’t run from it. We’re going to have to play together for it to have its highs and then have its lows, and then we can figure out how toward the end of the season we’re playing our best.”

In the limited time that Butler and Herro have played together this season, the Heat entered Saturday outscoring opponents by 0.8 points per 100 possessions in 174 minutes.

Those results aren’t negative. But the hope is those minutes will be closer to dominant than average moving forward, considering Butler and Herro are two of the Heat’s top players.

One of the biggest challenging surrounding the Butler-Herro tandem is finding a way to keep both of them as involved as they should be in the offense when they’re playing together.

Before Herro went out with an injury in early November, he was on track to post a career-high usage rate (an estimate of the percentage of team plays used by a player while on the court) at 28.1 percent through the first eight games of the season. On the other end of the spectrum, Butler’s usage rate was down from 24.8 percent last regular season to 22.2 percent during this eight-game stretch to begin the season.

After Herro went out, Butler’s usage rate spiked to 27.1 percent during the 18 games that Herro missed with his injury.

In the one game (a Dec. 18 home loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves) that Butler and Herro played together in the last seven weeks prior to Saturday, Herro’s usage rate was again high at 30.6 percent and Butler’s usage rate was again down at 19.5 percent.

“They’re involved in a lot of two-man and three-man actions, where they’re helping each other and making the game easier for the other guy,” Spoelstra said last month. “That’s only going to get better.”

INJURY REPORT

The Heat will again be missing a chunk of its rotation on Saturday against the Jazz.

The Heat ruled out Caleb Martin (right ankle sprain), Kyle Lowry (head contusion), Josh Richardson (low back discomfort), Orlando Robinson (G League), Cole Swider (G League) and Dru Smith (season-ending knee injury).

Lowry’s injury designation was switched from soreness to head contusion. Lowry was inadvertently kneed in the head by Adebayo during the Heat’s Christmas Day win over the Philadelphia 76ers and he’s still feeling the effects of the blow.

But Butler (left calf strain), Jaime Jaquez Jr. (non-COVID illness) and Duncan Robinson (left ankle sprain) will be available for the Heat against the Jazz.